Pumpkins summersault
         across lawns lit by fireflies.
                    Scintillating music crickets
                               vertiginous missives    
for sunflowers who spill
                    sleepy heads to seed.
         Tranquilo, mi cariño,
                    I hear your griot heart cleaving
         to the moon.
                               Your hymn will be singed hibiscus
                    en la madrugada.
History will empty its silences
                               from stoneware that pours
         a dune of dust at your feet,
                    cascades grapes, ginger melons, cassia tea.
                               Feast.
Someday, we will all swim
         into paleolithic pixels anyway. Let go
                    the cruciferous grime, and paint
                               with me this elusive magenta morning.
from the book TRACE: POEMS Red Hen Press
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I wrote “Tranquilo” for my husband, who is also a poet, when he was experiencing intense disappointment and stress. I hope it illustrates my attention to poetry’s language play, internal music, and field of the page. Although my interlingual poems usually incorporate Spanish more fully, it first enters this poem when the speaker begins to address the auditor, whose first language is Spanish, to soothe him.

Brenda Cárdenas on "Tranquilo"
black and white drawing of Shakespeare
On the Four Hundredth Anniversary of Shakespeare's First Folio

"The way the Folio presents Shakespeare and the way it has itself been presented, with accelerating reverence over the past few centuries, has naturally affected opinions of Shakespeare’s work. But the bromides and myths that surround the Folio—it is complete; it is authoritative; it must be protected—haven’t gone unchallenged. Many....asserted that the Folio was 'Published according to the True Originall Copies'....By the time the Folio appeared, Shakespeare had been dead seven years and was in no position to dispute their claims."

via POETRY FOUNDATION
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What Sparks Poetry:
Matt Donovan on Other Arts


"Yet, as with each of the blackout poems I wrote for our Missing Department project (twenty-five in all), there were always more resonant and unexpected meanings to explore beyond any words the two texts happened to share. Although I might have been initially pleased to make a connection between the mother's address in Klamath Falls and the story's descriptions of a river that ran through the center of its fictional town, for instance, the presence of moving water ended up affording me the poem's core metaphor."
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